The past few months I have been hard at work behind the scenes, updating my travel page. When I first started South End Style the main focus was interior design and decorating my first place. Over the past four years, the blog has evolved to include more and more travel guides, which has quickly become almost 50% of my blog business. If you have been following along, you know that I absolutely love to travel. I find such joy in experiencing new cultures, exploring new places and exposing myself to as many new destinations as I can. I also gather so much interior design inspiration from traveling- seeing how other people live and learning about their design styles has been eye opening. With every trip I take, I leave with some sort of inspiration.
Back to what I have been working on! Now that I have almost 100 travel guides (crazy to look back on all of the places I have been over the past few years), I wanted to figure out how to present everything to you in a more professional, cohesive manner. I went back and re-formatted every single post (hence why this took months to complete), uploaded better pictures and organized all of my notes to a standard format. Let me walk you through it:
To start, you can access my travel page by clicking on the static “travel guides” link below the header at the top any page, as well as by clicking on the “travel guides” category page on my homepage. Both of these links will take you to the same place – my new travel guides page.
Here you will see that the old list is gone! The page is now organized by 3 columns of posts, in chronological order or posting, with a feature image and a title. I went back and changed some titles to make them more specific and give a bit more insight. For example, “Travel Guides”, “Hotel Review”, “24 Hours In ____”, seasonal posts and so forth. Also, every place that I visit now has a post titled “10 Things to Know Before You Go” – this is where you’ll find helpful tips on travel logistics, bookings, currency, language, cultural tips, etc. I find these to be some of the most read travel posts as the tips are truly invaluable.
Each post has also been re-categorized to better reflect the subject. Every post on this site will be categorized with “travel guide” and then broken down further by “vacation” (actual vacations I took), “sponsored” (to be transparent with what was provided to me at no charge) and by city / country. This way if you want to search for anything related to Africa, for example, you can use the category feature at the bottom, select “Africa” and all 11 Africa-related posts will appear. My hope is that this allows you to research posts easier and find the information that you need as quickly as possible.
Lastly, each guide has been re-written and re-formatted to be the exact same. I believe that bringing a more cohesive structure to each guide makes them easier to read and allows you to know exactly what to look forward to in each post. This way, you don’t have to spend time digging through each post to figure out the best restaurants, bars, excursions, hotels and things that I did. I have everything broken down by 3 main categories: (1) where to stay (2) what to do and (3) where to eat and drink. Anytime that I revisit a place (for example, NYC) I will update these posts, so be sure to check back if you are looking at a specific destination. Follow me on Instagram to keep up with where I’m traveling – I’ll make sure to mention when specific city posts are updated!
Overall, I think that this is a huge improvement! I have worked tirelessly to get this right so I hope you enjoy it as well. Any travel post that I write going forward will follow this same format so now that all of the leg work is done, it’s smooth sailing from here. Next up, I’m working on updating my “Interior Design” page to reflect this same structure. As my business has picked up the past 12-18 months, I have quite a few projects that I need to take “after” pictures for and provide design details, furniture sources, etc. so my goal is to have all of that done by the end of the year. I hope you enjoy reading and thank you so much for following along!
[…] My New Travel Page! […]